Amnesia
by aschenblume
Summary: Just a little piece that I put together - it's pretty much based in Fallout, R&R! :D


_[Okay so I know the dates really don't line up, I'll fix that when I can. Enjoy! KB xx]_

Amnesia

Year 2278. Oh-six-hundred hours. An innumerable number of pinks, blues and oranges painted the sky a sunrise, as one of the only remaining survivors on the planet made her lonely way along. A gentle breeze carried along no scents to delight the Survivor, but it only brushed her hair aside and caressed the bottom of her trench-coat. As she cast her eyes over the scene, nothing moved, not a single thing remained alive. The nuclear war had left Earth in such a disgraceful state, the cities which had once been buzzing with life now were decrepit, rusting and dead. Not a single thing survived wholly intact, not even the people.

As she crested the hill, she cast her gaze over the wide plains, which almost appeared to have been bulldozed flat. Dust was all that was left of some buildings, the lucky ones had only collapsed in themselves. There was no greenery, just brown, wilted remains of once healthy plants. The only commodity in this land was bones. Hundreds and thousands of bones, the only remains of hundreds and thousands of corpses rotting away in the radioactivity. The Survivor wasn't wandering aimlessly, she had a goal, a safe haven called Hakai-no Tower. Even though it could have been a myth, it was all she really had to go by to find a special something she was searching for.

But this lonely life was not all the Survivor knew. She had a companion once, yes, a pet dog, but even that was killed eventually, by other… humans? Not humans, no, the radiation that had still remained for fifty years had changed them, messed with their genes like a kitten with a ball of yarn. It left them savage beasts, no remaining emotion or rational thought. The Survivor thought she was lucky, that she had become immune to it's effects. She _felt _normal enough.

There was once a life besides that of the 'lonely wanderer' that this twenty-something female once knew. Things were normal, or as normal as possible in such wastes. She had a family. A father, a mother, a younger sister. They were happy.. but her mother died in childbirth to the Survivor's younger sister, and the Survivor's father couldn't stand the grief. He committed suicide.

The Survivor had a name once. She used to be known as Bugs, as she wore big dark goggles which obscured most of her pale face. Her thick dirty brown hair was tied up messily under a cowboy hat, and she wore a scarf around her neck and over her mouth. Under her dark brown leather trench-coat, which was never buttoned up, she wore two black vests for warmth. A utility belt hung around her middle with all the necessary tools for survival, two pistols in holsters on either hip, a hunting rifle slung over her back and some hand grenades in various safe pockets. On her legs she wore thick khaki combats, which had gathered many rips, cuts and tears over the years. She simply had trusty engineer boots for her sore, sore feet.

Bugs was looking for her sister. They had become separated when where they used to live was ransacked by a huge, almost organized, group of the Beasts. It had been one of the few remaining safe havens in all of.. well, the world. Bugs had lost count of how long she had been searching. Two years? ..More?

Alone, tired, hungry and thirsty, Bugs wandered the open plains of the Wastes in a general direction of what she hoped was civilization. She had a lead on the whereabouts of her sister, but as she thought she had four times already, all turning out to be dead ends and/or traps, she didn't hold out much hope for this one.

She came across a huge pile of boulders that blocked her way, and her feet subconsciously went to take her around it. But then she heard voices.

Her initial reaction was to panic, there sounded like ten, maybe twenty people no more than ten feet around the corner, and she was running dangerously low on ammunition. Flee, or fight? The precious seconds she could have used to run she used up thinking, and so they all rounded the corner at once and saw her crouching there.

At first they froze out of pure shock, not moving for a split second, but then all of a sudden she had at least eight muzzles of guns pointing at point-blanc range at her skull, forcing her back to the boulder. No chance of escape, then.

"WHO ARE YOU!" One barked. In her head she scrambled, trying to recall how to speak. As there had been not exactly many people to talk to for so long, it was an uneasy task. "TELL OR WE'LL SHOOT!" The loud noise so suddenly gave her an amazing headache, and she opened her mouth and barely a sound came out. "I'M COUNTING TO THREE. ONE.. TWO.."

She signalled frantically to her neck and mouth, trying to convey how dehydrated she was. They got the message, and threw her a bottle of clean water. Bugs drank from it plentifully, draining it completely in one go though she was fully aware you weren't meant to.  
"Thanks, thought you were going to shoot there."  
"We still might." They seemed to have calmed a little at the sound of her voice, because just before a Beast turned savage, their voice box cracked and they became only capable of a feral growl. "What's your business here?"  
"I'm looking for my sister, perhaps you've seen her..?"  
"Are you alone?"  
"Yes, that's why I'm looking for her. We're the only ones left," she implored. Finally, after some extended silence falling upon them like a suffocating blanket, the man nodded. "Don't let the kids too near her, she's about as radiated as you can get without dissolving a hole through the ground. She's practically glowing." The guns were lifted from their intense proximity to her head and he offered her a hand.

"And sorry, but do I know you? Your voice seems somewhat familiar.." the man's voice trailed off, and he pulled the scarf from the bottom of his face. He too wore a similar hat, large leather coat, and general apparel. Only he seemed cleaner, like they had some sort of fresh water supply. Bugs had grown used to trying to identify that of a person.

She gasped at the sight of his face. "Andrew? Andy! It's me, Bugs! Flaming heck how I've missed you!" She threw herself at him, failing to notice his dubious expression.  
"When was the last time you drank fresh water?"  
"Sorry what? Oh is this you being generally paranoid?" She chuckled, happy beyond realising he did not seem to recognise her. "Last week. I think. More?"  
"You're dehydrated. I'm sorry, I don't remember a 'Bugs'.. but you're welcome to tag along with us. We're going to Hakai-no Tower."  
"Oh.. okay. Yes, thanks. I will. Are you sure you don't remember me?" Her mood dropped rapidly, back to her almost depressive state.  
"Certain, yes, sorry. I don't know who you are or how you know my name, but I don't remember you."  
"It's fine, my bad..." However, it _was_ the Andrew she knew, but the Bugs he remembered couldn't be this brink-of-mutating freak, surely…

An hour of silent, slow travel passed, before the children decided she could be trusted and resumed their previous games of play. Bugs cast her eye over the features of each one, not expecting at all to see right there in the middle, rosy-cheeked green-eyed eight-year-old Suzie. She ran over, grasping the poor child on both shoulders.  
"Suzie?!" Tears welled up in her eyes, as she looked upon her long lost sister. "Suzie it's me, Bugs!"  
"Who are you? You aren't my sister. My sister would never use a gun," the child insisted, flinching away somewhat from Bugs. They had garnered the attention of the rest of the group of travellers, and the self-appointed guardians readied their guns cautiously.  
"But.. Suzie sweetie it's me!" In her excitement, Bugs put Suzie down and pulled her goggles out and her scarf down. "It's m--!" She didn't finish her sentence, because she was cut off by a blood-curdling scream. The child ran straight for the guardians, hiding behind their legs at the sight of Bugs' face.

Bugs stared, letting the goggles go and smack on her forehead. Andrew walked over with Suzie, and went to speak before catching sight of her face and yelping too. He jumped back and cocked his gun to aim at her head. "GET LOST, NOW. WE'LL SHOOT IF YOU COME ANYWHERE NEAR US AGAIN!" He signalled for warning shots at her feet. Bang, bang, bang

As quickly as she could, she gathered herself and ran, just ran flat out. She sprinted and threw herself forward as fast as she could, away from the only reason she had been searching so long, but still all she could hear was the scream, and the shots being fired at her back. That scream.. that scream she had heard before. She couldn't see why they didn't remember her. Bugs pondered, _Why have they, like a mirror image of the world, forgotten how things used to be?_

She stopped finally, gasping for breath at a lake's edge. Bugs suddenly screamed, and reeled back, half expecting the monster that stared back out at her to launch itself from the water's depths. A few seconds passed, and nothing happened, so she returned to the water's edge. There, she saw her reflection.

Everything had changed. She now had a large ugly pink scar stretching diagonally over her face, marring her once smooth complexion. Her nose appeared to not have mended straight after being broken, and her eyes were bloodshot to the point where you could no longer see the whites of her eyes. Her actual irises were tinged with an unnatural hue, a sort of glow. And looking herself in the pupil, what was known as the gateway to the soul? Was an experience akin to being pulled into a freezing vacuum of space, no emotion, just cold unfeeling depth and infinity. She gazed at her reflection- no, she _refused _to refer to it as that. It was not her. It just wasn't. Everyone else must have changed, not Bugs. She couldn't have.. But.. then what _did_ she look like?

Racking her memory, Bugs found she just couldn't tell. She didn't know. _She didn't know._ Horror paralysed her, creeping coldly over her bones. She, like everyone else, couldn't remember. It was like their Survival instincts kicking in and saving their sanity, making them forget how easier things were before. The radiation, by forcing them to adapt and change into monsters, either physically or mentally, was the source of this.. This… Amnesia.

The wind again whispered around her coat-tails, and she stared off into the distance. Once again the lonely wanderer, the only Survivor. It was year 2278, and this time, she whispered _with_ the wind.  
"Even I have forgotten who I am…"


End file.
